


Another Inch of Your Life

by orphan_account



Category: JONAS, Jonas Brothers
Genre: AU, M/M, spy AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-12
Updated: 2012-05-12
Packaged: 2017-11-05 05:16:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/402830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spy AU: The Lovatos take Joe. Nick's going to get him back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Another Inch of Your Life

**Author's Note:**

> Written for ibonekoen for the qldfloodauction (yes, I have been working on this that long). She wanted essentially a J.O.N.A.S. spy AU, and I did what I could to deliver. Thanks to mediaville for the helpful, thoughtful, and enthusiastic read-through and comments; you're a life saver. And another thanks to yakbites for popping in to listen to me talk about Mother Russia and Joe in earmuffs and treating it like a legitimate conversation. Title from Jack White's "Another Way to Die." Another inch of your life / Sacrificed for your brother / In the nick of time.

It's midterms, which means that for once Nick's attention is more than twenty percent engaged, buried as he is hair-gel deep in AP Calculus. Nick twists his number two pencil between his fingers over and over again until everything is mapped out in his head and he can commit it to paper. His handwriting is spiky like an electrocardiogram at the best of times, so he tries to make it neat, shaping his As and Ts with precision.

The exam is a full hour and a half, and he's only twenty minutes into it. The sounds of pencils scratching on paper in an otherwise silent room is grating on him like a buzzing fly. He tries to shake it off, focusing on integers and formulas instead, wishing he had headphones.

He's annoyed, then, when a soft voice says "Mister Lucas?" and rips his concentration out from under him.

Nick's head comes up. "Yes?"

A T.A. from the administration office is holding a note in her left hand, biting her lip and staring at him in a way she probably thinks is subtle. Nick warily straightens in his seat. He never gets called to the administration office. Nick makes it a point to stay under the radar. He's third in class rather than first, _just in case_ , which is ridiculous since everyone already knows his last name, his favorite song, his ice cream flavor, and the make of his favorite guitar. But mom insists.

"Principal Wallis wants to see you in his office."

Nick wants to spare a moment of annoyance over everyone in class now knowing that he's headed to Wallis' office like he's been truant or something, but all he does is nod and hurriedly collect his things.

Nick doesn't get called to the principal's office.

The T.A. doesn't say anything to him as they walk down the hall together. She stares at her glossy Mary Jane shoes until they're at their destination, giving him a quick smile before vanishing. Nick adjusts the shoulder strap on his bag and pokes his head around the open door frame of Wallis' office.

An automatic "You wanted to see me?" is out of his mouth before he's really processed what's in front of him. His mom and Big Man are in the room, mom in a chair and Big Man leaning up against the wall. It isn't the first time they've been to his school, but it's the first time they've had their game faces on. That gives it away almost as much as the nervous tapping of Wallis' pen against his desk.

"What's wrong?" he demands.

"It's Joe," mom says, and she's never looked older than that moment, her hair and makeup picture-perfect but her face turned down all wrong. "He's missing."

–

Nick doesn't panic. As a general rule. He leaves the panicking to dad, or to Kevin occasionally, his breathing and his hands steady while everyone else is tearing out their hair. But this is the closest he's ever come, including that time Kevin blew up the garage, and he doesn't like the feeling.

He silent until they're in the car, conscious of his mom's too-tight grip on his arm and Big Man's protective proximity. The windows are tinted, and it's not like fans or paparazzi swarm him on campus anyway, but Nick doesn't let himself show for a second what's going on. His uniform tie is strangling him, but he keeps it in its knot.

"He's missing?" Nick says to his mom, just as he's dialing Kevin's number and putting his phone to his ear.

"Kidnapped."

Kevin answers after the first ring. "K2."

Nick's pulling his laptop out of his bag, crumpling trapped paper along the way and not caring. There's wireless in the car, and he slides his index finger over the scanning pad and types in his password one-handed. "Kevin."

His mom turns to look outside, worrying her gold wedding band around her finger. Big Man is driving exactly the speed limit, and Nick desperately wishes for the first time that they'd decided to go with installing emergency sirens after all.

"Nick, you're okay? Dad, Nick's okay."

"I'm fine. What do we know?"

He hears the clicking of keys, Kevin at his computers. Nick's laptop is good enough on the go, but it's nothing like their makeshift War Room, which is dominated by seven computers, a weapons cache, and Frankie's stupid Power Ranger action figures all over the floor.

"Not a lot," Kevin says grimly. "Joe missed his 12:00 check-in. When was the last time you spoke to him?"

"This morning. And he sent me a text before my first class at 08:00."

 _u show midterms whos boss_ , to be precise.

From the front seat, Big Man tosses back, "Five minutes out." Like Nick doesn't know exactly where he is and how if they don't speed up they're going to be stuck at the tortuously slow red light two blocks up on Hawthorne.

"Do we know where he was?"

"He was downtown shopping," mom says, still looking out of the window. "He took the Mercedes." It has a big trunk, so it's Joe's favorite car to use on shopping trips when he invariably comes home with something oversized and usually from Ikea. "Stella said they went to get frozen yogurt, and he went to the restroom and..."

Never came back out.

"I'm looking at the surveillance video, but the store itself didn't have cameras. You can see Joe and Stella go in through the mall entrance." More typing. "There's an employee exit that empties out at a parking lot."

"I want to see the blueprints. And the surveillance. Any of it. All of it, anywhere there's cameras in that mall."

"Already in your inbox. I'm trying to hack the traffic cams."

Kevin started screaming bloody murder when he blew up the garage, but he managed to scream, shield Frankie, and wield the fire extinguisher at the same time. He underwent the same training Nick did (with a little more fencing and a lot more back handsprings) but sometimes Nick forgets that.

Joe's the best at undercover ops – he's really the only one with that kind of field experience. Nick's _too young_ , and while Kevin can think on his feet, he's, well, Kevin. He looks suspiciously trustworthy, for one thing, and he's the most tech-savvy person in their family. Their mom calls him a "gentle soul," usually while petting his hair like he's an overgrown poodle. Basically? No one wants to picture Kevin getting shot. It would be like watching Bambi's mother.

Joe, though, he's fast (not as fast as Nick, but somehow slippery), and when he's on a mission, lies pour out of him like honey when they'd get stuck in Nick's throat. Nick over-thinks. He's supposed to act on _instinct_ , to know that the training is there for him to fall back on. But he can't shake his natural urge to analyze everything to death, and it's a distraction and a potential liability. Nick stays behind and trains; Joe's the one they send out into the world.

Kevin's the geek. Nick's the planner. And Joe's the impulsive one. 

Nick's fingers are itching for something to do. His whole _body_ is straining for something to do. It's a deep impulse, something his overbusy brain can't staunch. He wonders if this is how Joe feels.

"Got the blueprints," Nick says, tapping his keys to zoom in on the design.

"Okay." The car is quiet but for the tinny sounds of Kevin's typing, and then there's a pause. "Are you guys nearly home?" Kevin asks, in a far less assured voice.

"We're pulling up right now," Nick says, using his left hand to unbuckle his seatbelt and grab his satchel. He gives his mom his best version of an encouraging face, but even he can feel how white and strained his lips are, how much it looks like a grimace.

–

It goes straight to all of their email accounts – the family accounts, not the ones a stranger would find on Joe's phone if they had it. Not the ones Joe would give them when interrogated. Kevin's the one who reads it first, the fastest at his legion of computers.

"Guys," Kevin says, and they all hover over his shoulder, dad patting him there as a soothing gesture. The idea of being touched makes Nick's skin crawl, but Kevin seems to relax infinitesimally under it.

It's an attachment, not a link, not a live feed, and the email is clearly a spam bot re-purposed by someone with more than passing skill. Tracking it down could take days. Nick dismisses it as a lead and resolutely ignores the despairing panic that wells up, knowing they're still floundering without a solid grip on _anything_ useful. The attachment might yield something.

There's no subject, no text, just "video_1.avi." Kevin clicks it. It's not very big, fifty megabytes or so, and the player loads it almost immediately.

The video is black and white, but the resolution is clear, not at all grainy, so at least they were spared the whole cliché. Nick can see Joe, seated in a chair, arms tied behind his back in a way that hurts, if the jutting angle of his shoulder is any indication. The pain doesn't show on his face; not much does, actually. He looks wary but not terrified, jaw locked. He isn't looking at the camera just beyond it, and it only takes a moment for Nick to realize he's eye-lining his (or one of his) abductors. It gives Nick a rough idea of height, when he goes back to calibrate, and it's not much but it's something. It shows Joe is thinking, planning, and Nick feels a bolt of fear and pride jolt his heart.

There's a long stretch of silence, and it feels like the hairs on the back of Nick's neck are rising, his body humming like a tuning fork. The room feels too close. He stares at Joe's face and catalogs it like he's never seen it before, like he's a mark that he needs to memorize. Like he's starving, really, desperate for anything.

"We have Joe Lucas in our possession. Four million dollars are required to see Mr Lucas alive."

The phrasing is clipped and distinct, not to mention accented, but that's not what catches Nick's attention. They didn't say "required for the release of Mr Lucas." He doesn't want to leap to conclusions, but his brain is whirring, picking up and discarding half-nonsensical theories before they're fully formed. He stares at Joe, who has barely blinked, and focuses on _alive_. They're all insured for kidnapping up to five million -- thank you U.S. Government, but couldn't you have made it ten? -- and mom and dad have almost three in the bank. Nick has a quarter million. Kevin invests in the stock market. They can call in favors, cash out, make it work.

"You will receive further instructions at 15:00. I would suggest preparations."

The file ends there, a meager forty seconds. The room was nondescript, no identifying objects, and was clearly nowhere near a window. They weren't in a plane or in a car; the sound was too crisp for them to have concealed something like that. No leads there, except for the fact that Joe can't be more than maybe six hours away by now.

Kevin breaks the silence. "Those were Russian accents."

Mom is pretty much talking over him, voice shaky, "Tom, can you call--"

Dad's already on the phone, and Kevin's already emailing someone, and Nick is _useless_ without something to do, so he backs up and paces.

"It could have been Kyrgyz, I think, I don't know, I'm not as good with languages as Macy, I'll email her the file--"

"The accents were fake," Nick says, half-absently, barely resisting pulling at his own hair.

"What?"

"The accents were fake." Nick has the bare minimum in terms of linguistics, but he _does_ have perfect pitch. "They were slipping in and out of whatever it was, weak on what should have been hard words. 'Receive,' 'required.' I don't know what they are, but they're not Russian. Kyrgyz. Whatever."

"Okay," Kevin says slowly, somewhat dubiously, but like he's going to accept it. "I'm still going to email Macy--"

"Whatever," Nick repeats. "I'm going to my room, I'll be back before the next video."

"Nick," he heard his mom say behind him as he leaves the War Room, but he can't stop.

–

Nick instinctively heads to his room, but Joe's is just beyond his, and it's like an invisible pull draws his hand to the doorknob. Nick goes inside, but he doesn't flip on the light. Afternoon sunlight filters in through the small gap Joe'd left in the curtains. He hadn't made his bed that morning, and the covers are haphazard, his pillow wadded up near the headboard.

Joe's room isn't as organized as Nick's, or as bare, but it is clean. The unmade bed is the only thing out of place. Even the top of his desk is neat, everything filed away in its proper place. Joe's cologne is arranged in a row according to size. He has more than Nick, but the only one he uses regularly is Old Spice. Nick won't go near it, he sticks to Ralph Lauren and leaves Old Spice to grandfathers and his weird older brother, but he has this swelling urge to spray some.

He leaves before he gives in. Nick's not that... he's not that.

He does stop by his room, but the comfort of it being _Nick's_ isn't helping. Nothing feels comfortable, or even familiar. It weirds him out, so he ends up splashing water on his face and checking his phone. It's quiet, and that helps. It's the quiet more than anything else that lets him pull himself back into his own skin a little.

\--

The second video is longer than the first.

When the email shows up, everything slows down. Dad hangs up the phone; he was still on the bank, because everyone has realized that four million could just be the beginning. Kevin freezes in his chair. Nick is the one who presses play.

His ears are not-so-literally perked, primed and ready to listen, to wade through the fake accents for any sign of a clue. But the second he sees Joe on the screen, his brown eyes the slightest bit wider than they were in the first one, the smallest trickle of blood falling from his lip, Nick thinks he might be deaf. Whatever instructions they give in their make-pretend accents, Nick hears them as if through a dream.

Three punches, and Joe shaking his head like he's shaking off water from a shower after each one. Nick's body jolts with each thud, the surprisingly quiet and brutal sound of flesh hitting flesh.

He could send them an email. They'd probably receive it; rerouted through spam bots though it may be, they probably planned for every contingency. Even if he could think of something to write, Nick's not going to waste time drafting when he could be doing something useful.

Kevin's phone rings in the silence, startling everybody, and he pulls it from his pocket as if in a daze, eyes still unblinking on the screen in front of him. The video is paused at the very beginning of the file, an impression of the room Joe is in with his body half-blocked by someone standing in the way of the frame. Probably adjusting the camera. "K2," he says dully. It's wrong to hear him so lifeless, especially using his code name. He's usually _delighted_ by it, tone steeped in mirth, almost as delighted as he is when he calls Nick 007.

His actual code name is Mr President, which Joe insists is ridiculous, but he's Danger and like that's any better. Nick has teeth-gritting twinges of irritation when they persist with the 007 thing, and no amount of Kevin scoffing "oh, like somebody's going to overhear Mister President and think that's totally normal" is going to make him less annoyed. "Like I'm the sort of person who'd have a personal line to the White House," Kevin said the last time it came up, and Nick sullenly muttered "but you do."

Sitting around thinking about this and feeling longing _nostalgia_ for it isn't any better than what he was doing before. Nick leans closer to Kevin.

"Who is it?"

"Macy," Kevin says. A crease is drawing between his eyebrows, and Nick tenses. "Really? What does it say?"

"What? What does what say?"

Kevin waves a distracted, dismissive hand at Nick. "That's it?" he says, pulling a piece of paper toward him and one of the criminally expensive pens Nick and Joe gave him last Christmas. He scrawls something. "No, thanks, Macy." He hangs up the phone. "Joe ditched his cell in the bathroom, and I guess he had enough time to start a text. To you." Nick leans down even more to read it. 'Ursul.'

A chill twists through Nick's spine, squeezing his nerves like a fist. He knows exactly what that means.

Eight months ago, Joe spent several weeks infiltrating the Lovato family. He'd had a peculiar in, one Nick could tell he wasn't entirely comfortable with. The eldest daughter Dallas was perpetually picking up and discarding boyfriends, and Joe smiled his way into being one of them. The second he had a minute alone in the mansion, he used Kevin's laborious instructions and pretty ingenious code to hack the computer in Patrick Lovato's office and load as many red-flag files onto his USB as possible.

He'd nearly been caught, and he hadn't been invited back to the mansion after he dodged Dallas' invitation to her bedroom a few too many times. Dallas dropped him like a rock shortly after, but at least the files gave them a few leads. And put Patrick away for a month, even if he'd ultimately wriggled out of the charges.

They found out, somehow. Either there was some intel on the family or Kevin's backdoor ninjaing hadn't been so ninja after all. It didn't matter. Nick knew who'd taken his brother.

One night, when Nick was up late methodically cleaning his weapons and doing Joe a favor after he'd whined for five minutes by oiling his as well, Joe stayed up and told him exactly how much pretending to date Dallas had sucked. While _he_ was pretending, she definitely wasn't, and Nick felt queasy when Joe told him about her hands plucking at the waistband of his boxers and how he'd barely been able to stop her. The hickeys he kept coming home with. Joe called her Ursula. The octopus from 'The Little Mermaid,' because "her hands go, like, everywhere. And I'm pretty sure she has a cave full of condemned souls somewhere."

From everyone else's lack of reaction, Nick is sure Joe hasn't shared that particular nickname with anyone but him. Which means Nick is the only person who knows the Lovatos are the ones responsible.

The Lovatos are clever enough (clever enough to snatch Joe from a crowded mall), but they're a mob family, best suited for drugs and money laundering kept in the industrial district. They overcompensated because they knew who they were dealing with, and they slipped up. Swiss bank accounts? Russian accents? All that _and_ they went for punches and pliers?

What he does know, though, is that the Lovato family doesn't just let you walk away. Not when you owe a debt like they think that their whole family does for turning Patrick Lovato in. They're going to milk them for all that they're worth and then they're going to chuck Joe's body in the river, possibly wearing concrete shoes because they're truly that unoriginal.

Nick would bet the four million that they're keeping Joe local their cleverness has a limit, since kidnapping isn't their point of expertise. They're too clueless to take him out of town or maybe somehow savants because Nick only just thought of that. He only has a vague idea of their location in the city, but Joe's files are always reliable.

Everyone is too preoccupied with trying to _decode_ Joe's text to notice when Nick plugs in a USB drive to one of the computers. He pretends like he's watching one of the videos, but he's emailing files to his phone. They're going to check the history when they realize what's going on, but hopefully Nick will be long gone before they do. He clears out the history anyway. No sense making it easy for them.

"Any luck with the bank?" Nick asks, tucking the drive into his pocket. His mom turns to him, her fingertips pressed to her lips. She nods hesitantly. "It'll be fine. Joe will be fine. Kevin can probably steal us a few more million if he tries."

"I hadn't thought of that," Kevin says, and immediately starts clicking with renewed vigor. Sufficiently distracted.

"I'm going to my room. I need to think."

"Of course."

–

Joe's bike is parked in the back garage. Nick bought it for him for his eighteenth birthday, and honestly he hates the stupid thing, but it made Joe so happy when he saw it in the driveway. He shows it off to everyone who comes over, _look what my bro got me_ , and Nick has always been slightly paranoid that Joe was going to wreck it. You can't take back a birthday gift, though.

Nick pulls out the GPS tracker he'd installed himself when he brought it home. Kevin knows about it, or at least Nick'd told him about it, and if he remembers he'll definitely track it.

There's a backup weapons cache hidden behind a tool shed dad only finds use for when he needs a screwdriver. Nick's never accessed it himself, but he's seen his dad do it more than a handful of times, so it's no hard task to reach in and grope for the lever that slides the took shed to the left, out of the way. The access code is seven digits, and strictly speaking the kids haven't been _given_ it Joe has an unfortunate habit of clearing out without permission and forgetting to restock, so he's sort of on probation but his dad knows that if you don't want Nick to know something, then he needs to be out of the room.

It's only a backup cache, so there isn't a full arsenal; it's mostly ammo. There are gas canisters, five grenades, and Nick takes the gas in favor of the grenades, and then it's a taser tucked into his pants, a 22, and a Makarov pistol Nick basically grew up shooting. He straps himself down with as much ammo as he thinks he can carry and calls it good.

Nick disengages the lock and pulls the garage door up by hand. The helmet he bought Joe along with the bike sits unused on its shelf, a thin layer of dust obscuring its gleam. Nick wipes it off with his sleeve and puts it on. It's almost too tight against the sides of his head.

He's riding off to save his brother on what might be the worst day of his life so far in a _motorcycle with a sidecar_. He feels like Indiana Jones in The Last Crusade, only Joe isn't there to play Sean Connery to his Harrison Ford, and that entire reference is the sort of thing _Joe_ would think and not have the decency to keep to himself.

He ignores that thought; he ignores the leaden weight still knocking around in his stomach; he ignores the fact that his hands have started to shake.

Nick pushes the bike from the garage to the driveway and climbs on.

–

He parks the motorcycle a street over. He should have parked a block away or more, but time is running out, and the odds aren't looking great for him to begin with; what's another risk when the deck is already stacked? Nick glanced at the street grid at one red light and the blueprints for the three most likely holding places at another, but it's always different when you come up on things physically. It's nearing dusk winter days being what they are and each building looms like a watchtower against what's left of the light in the sky.

He goes for the first building he thinks they might have Joe in, and unfortunately it's the biggest. Biggest opportunity for mistakes, biggest hornet's nest to step in. He has a quick thirty seconds to decide what he's going to do; the circuit breaker is in the back of the building, and the back door is harder to bust in.

Nick opts for the front. It's guarded by two men, not overtly there are no weapons out, but Nick can see that they're carrying, and they pretty much fit the textbook definition of goon. Nick didn't bring anything long range, but he did bring a taser gun.

The first goes down to his knees, the buzzing of painful voltages in the air, and Nick runs after the second while he's still startled from the sudden burst of activity. He's big, and Nick's small; he's not spry and gymnastic like Kevin, or as body-obsessed as Joe, but he's fast, athletic, and people underestimate an admittedly short teenager. Nick hits the second guard in the throat before he can blink and doesn't have to bother wrestling the gun away; he drops it as soon as he has to start struggling for air. He kicks it far out of reach and heads for the door, but he waits long enough to fish out a canister of gas and leave it hissing to keep them unconscious in his wake.

There isn't anyone immediately inside of the doors, and Nick draws his Makarov, keeping his back along the wall. It isn't until he reaches the first set of open doors that he hears movement. He waits thirty seconds to see if they'll come out, identifying two sets of voices, and when it becomes clear they're not going to move and make his life easier, he takes a breath and steps inside.

The first one was closer to the door than Nick had anticipated, and takes a punch before he can get one in. It gives him vertigo, unsettles him in a wicked burst of pain and dizziness, but he rears back and kicks the guy in the stomach until he goes down. He barely spares the time to knock him out with the butt of his pistol before he's on to the next.

For mafia thugs, they're remarkably easy to take out. Like mall cops armed with more than batons and power trips. Nick doesn't let himself rest on his laurels, and he clears more rooms before he gets a sinking feeling that this is the wrong building.

Gritting his teeth, he slips out the back and advances to the second. It's smaller, and Nick's fairly certain that no one's found the guards yet, so he's going in while they're blind to his presence.

Sometimes Nick gets these feelings, and he likes to think that they're just hunches born from years of superb training and excellent instincts, but there's no rhyme or reason to them. They sneak up on him, sending weird chills down his arms, metaphorically perking his ears, stiffening his muscles until he's half-anticipating and half-terrified out of his mind. They're not particularly nice sensations. And they usually mean that something's about to happen.

He cocks his gun and closes in on the first door he sees, shut to him, and with the gentlest of twists to the handle he discerns that it's locked. Shooting it will get him nowhere, and if Joe's behind that door, he'll end up with a bullet between his eyes before Nick can step into the room.

He steadies himself and hopes against hope that they're not clever enough to invent a knocking code.

The door opens and Nick kicks it the rest of the way in, hearing a thump as a body reels across the room and slams into the wall behind it. He wastes an urgent millisecond debating a gas canister before discarding the idea too many variables, and he can't see inside yet and he barrels inside to knock out the guy he'd flung against the wall. Nick doesn't let himself look at faces, take in details; they'll only slow him down, and he _needs_ to be fast, the fastest he's ever been in his life.

"What the fuck?" someone says, and Nick advances, dodging a punch that really, really would have hurt.

It leaves him open to reach up and viciously twist a hand into the man's hair, using the force of his whole body, from his toes to the flex of muscle in his shoulder, to slam his head backwards against the wall, one, two, three, thud, thud, thud. He feels the man slump, but he doesn't think he's all the way out. Before he can follow through, someone gets him in a sloppy headlock from behind, and Nick really hates that sensation. He plants a foot against the wall in front of him and uses the force to shove them both back, twisting out of the headlock with far less finesse than he would have liked, getting a forearm to the throat in the process.

He catches the look on the man's face, and it's priceless; Nick usually takes a moment to gloat over the fact that he routinely beats people twice his size in hand to hand, but right now it barely registers. He throws a punch left-handed and follows it up with one to the stomach. It's not his dominant arm, it's weaker, but he can still throw a decent punch.

His hands are going to kill him later.

Once the guy is doubled over, Nick slams down with the butt of his gun. Easiest method.

And then he takes a breath, struggling with a feeling he's got like there's not enough air in the room; it's hard to hear above panting. He's still thrumming with adrenalin, so it takes him a moment to remember to scope the rest of the room.

It's almost a visceral shock when he turns around and sees Joe tied to the chair in the corner. He's staring at Nick like he's a hallucination, and Nick's sure his face looks the same.

He's shirtless, which he wasn't before, and now Nick can clearly see that the way they've tied him is nearly dislocating his shoulder. Bruises are scattered over his torso, some on his face, and there's a new cut that looks worse than it is dripping a small trail of blood from his neck to his chest. Another one by his ribcage that looks a little deeper. Nick's good at stitches.

A mournful "oh, Joe" slips out of Nick's mouth before he can help it, but he's so distracted it comes out barely audible. He strides across the room and goes to his knees by the chair, dropping his Makarov to the floor and ignoring the crude handkerchief gag in Joe's mouth in favor of the ropes. Thank God they're not handcuffs; it would take Nick longer to finagle those locks or find the key that it does for him to release the most complicated of knots.

Joe's hands are streaked with blood, and the sight of one of his fingernails where one used to be before they _ripped it out_ is so raw and unexpected that Nick feels actual pain in his chest.

"I'm getting you out of here," Nick mutters, gingerly picking at the first of a few relatively basic knots. Joe's fingers twitch. "It's all right."

Joe's breathing gets louder as Nick works, and Nick gets this urge to shush him like his mom would when they were sick, trying to soothe. His brain is going haywire. Joe's _alive_ and Nick found him in time and they're going to get out of there. His hands start to tremble, and he pulls them away to shake them out and refocus.

He's so wrapped up in the third and final set of knots that he doesn't hear anything until Joe's muffled shout, a long, panicked "nnnn" that's probably his name.

Nick drops to his side and rolls. He's already got his gun in hand when he sees that there's one trained on him, a man Nick only sees as shapes, like a target, and he pulls the trigger for the first time in his life outside of a range or a simulation.

The smoke smells acrid and the pistol feels hot and Nick's woozy in the silence and Joe's screaming into the gag, horrible, primal noises.

That's really all he remembers.

–

The ability to open his eyes eludes him for a few moments, but Nick is definitely conscious again. He groans and lifts his head up, blinking when his vision blurs Topsy-turvy before finally leveling out.

He's in a car _their_ car, Nick notes with relief, with Big Man driving and dad in the front seat, on his phone, no doubt doing damage control.

"Joe?"

"I'm here," Joe says quietly from behind him.

Nick feels like there's weights dragging down all of his limbs, and he knows intimately what that actually feels like from training, but for some reason it's harder to shift around on the seat to look back at Joe than it is to drag himself on his stomach through desert conditions.

Kevin is bandaging Joe's hand, intent on his task, fingers quick and methodical but careful, gentler than Nick could have managed by far. Joe's still shirtless, but he has a blanket tucked around him. Nick can see the cuts on his chest, and Nick's never really been cut outside from kitchen accidents, so he has no idea if it's seriously bothering Joe or if the pain is negligible.

His face has been cleaned up, butterfly bandages covering split skin, but it's still startling. His eyes look a little glazed, his mouth turned down at the corners, bruises swelling and darkening his skin.

Nick's staring, and he only realizes when Kevin finishes bandaging Joe's hand and lobs a bottle of apple juice at Nick's head. Nick barely jerks to attention in time to catch it.

"Drink," Kevin instructs, voice low and angry even as he gently places Joe's injured hand in his own lap and pats his wrist in comfort. "Now."

He unscrews the cap, surprised his hands remember _how_ he feels so out of it, and goes back to staring at Joe, who gives him a half-hearted smile.

The juice tastes too sweet but it's fairly cold and Nick's mouth is beyond parched. He lets it wet his mouth, his tongue, drawing in large mouthfuls before swallowing. "What happened?" he asks eventually, and if he thought Kevin seemed angry before, Nick had no idea how high that gage went. The look in his eyes is piercing and makes Nick want to slink down in his seat.

"You passed out." Nick can see Joe looking at him from the corner of his eye, but somehow he thinks that ignoring Kevin at this point and time would be a mistake he'd pay for until the end of his natural life. "Because you're an _idiot_."

"Hey," Nick protests a little weakly. "I'm all right. Joe's all right."

"Joe is not all right," Kevin says, voice pitching higher. He'd picked the first aid kit up, presumably to finish up on Joe, but he drops it back down to the floor of the SUV and leans forward in his seat. "You're not all right. You're a seventeen year old _idiot_ who rant into suicide, alone, like an _idiot_. You could have gotten yourself killed. You could have gotten Joe killed."

Nick grits his teeth. He doesn't have the energy to argue, but it's tiring to hear the word idiot so many times while Nick is the reason that Joe _isn't_ dead, that he's sitting in the back seat of the SUV with his blanket and all of his limbs intact. "But I didn't. I completed the mission with --"

" _What_ mission?" Kevin shouts, and the low murmur of dad's voice on the phone halts completely. "You're a kid with, like, _no_ field experience. There was no planning, no contingencies, no backup. Your idea of a mission was _shooting someone_ and then _passing out_."

Nick can't take the barrage of righteousness coming from Kevin, not with everything so fresh, gunpowder acrid in the air, his ears still ringing, and Joe watching with tired eyes. And it's just _Kevin_ laying into him, too, not his dad, or even Big Man, who never hesitates to tell Nick when he's stepped a toe out of line. It's emasculating to say the least. "I went in by myself because a team of us would have tripped every alarm before we even breached the perimeter. I'm the smallest, and I'm the best at hand to hand. I'm the best, period, and don't give me that look. You know I'm right. Going in alone gave me the best chance of extraction. And guess what," Nick says, gaining more anger, fingers digging into the thick mass of the car seat, and watching Kevin frown, "I was right about that too."

"So right you nearly killed someone, smart-ass," Kevin says, but with less vicious anger than before. "Nowhere in protocol does it say that you're supposed to run without so much as a 'bye guys, gonna go get my head blown off!' You're still in training, and you proved it today. You know you're not _actually_ James Bond, right?"

"Guys," Joe says quietly. "Can we just -- not? Everyone's okay, and you don't have to bother with yelling at Nick over being an idiot because mom'll ground him until he's thirty anyway. I want," he falters, and shakes his head like he's trying to clear it. "I want to go home."

Both Nick and Kevin are silent, and neither of them can look at anything but Joe. "We're almost there, buddy," Kevin says, squeezing Joe's forearm reassuringly. 

"Five more minutes." Nick wishes he was sitting next to Joe; he wants to touch him, but it'd be weird to reach out and do it from where he is. He can't make himself do it. 

Joe offers a tired smile. "Finish your juice."

\--

It's when he trudges in through the front door when Nick realizes how bad off he is. He's limping, for one, and if he was a civilian he'd probably fall over in a heap and pass out. He's not, so he manages to make his way into the kitchen, wash his hands, and get himself a glass of water from the tap. He's sipping it, facing the window that gives him a picturesque view of the backyard, but not seeing it at all. His knuckles are stiff and swollen, his hand clutching the glass like it's a claw.

He'd left Joe with Kevin and ultimately to their parents, and he's expecting them to be a while, but the tap-tap of his mom's heels on the hardwood leading to the kitchen tile comes within minutes.

"Just a few minutes and we can debrief," Nick says, dumping the rest of his water down the drain. He needs to eat something now; the apple juice helped, but his hands aren't steady.

When he turns to her, he sees a split-second of swollen eyes and pale skin before her palm connects with the side of his face. It's not hard, barely a sting, and he instinctively turns his head with it to lessen the impact. He's barely processing the fact that his mother just hit him, his mom who freaked out if he took a punch too hard wearing _pads_ , who railed at the idea of parents so much as putting their children in a time-out corner. She physically struck him. But in the next moment she bursts into loud, messy sobs, pulling him forward into her arms and enveloping him with her small arms and floral perfume.

Instinct moves him to pull her closer, and he presses his cheek against the top of her head, closing his eyes.

"I'm sorry," he says, and for the first time that day he is. He didn't care what Kevin said in the car; everything was worth it as long as he had Joe in front of him. But in her eyes he could have taken them both from her, and he can afford to be sorry about that, a little.

She whispers something into his shoulder that he can't make out, and the two of them stand together, tucked close.

He opens his eyes when she starts to pull away, and it's to find Joe and Kevin watching them from just outside of the kitchen. His mom's attention goes straight back to Joe, and Nick feels the relief of it shifting from him like a harsh spotlight. Joe's eyes are still on him, though, as he pulls mom close. 

"Have you eaten something?" Kevin asks him.

"Not yet. I was going to make... I don't know what."

Kevin sighs and walks past him, opening the cupboards and pulling out a plate. "Ham and cheese?" he asks, and doesn't see the face Nick makes.

"No, too heavy."

Kevin sighs again, slamming the fridge door closed with far too much force. "Crackers? Nuts? My head on a silver platter?"

"No. No. I don't... I'll figure something out. You don't have to--"

"Boys," their mom interrupts softly.

They aren't really fighting, and it feels way less personal and frightening than it did in the car, but the tension is still ratcheted up and Kevin is taking it out on Nick, and Nick would be too if he wasn't so tired. "Sorry," Nick apologizes, which is something he gets the feeling he'll be doing for a while, if he wants to ever leave the house again.

"Joe, are you hungry?" mom asks.

Joe hesitates, the purse to his lips saying _no, absolutely not_ , but all of them know he desperately needs to refuel. 

"You should eat," Nick says decisively. "I'll make you something."

The look on Kevin's face -- Kevin, who's still standing at the fridge -- is comical, so indignant and shocked that Nick has to bite his lip or risk making him explode by laughing. "I hate you so much right now," Kevin says in an almost wondering tone.

"You love me," Nick tosses off, and something is loosening in his chest but he knows it's a long way from being enough. "Soup? Do you want soup?"

"I'll eat soup if you eat soup," Joe offers.

"I'll eat soup if you take some Vicodin and go up to bed." If anyone thinks Joe's going to stay awake and recount whatever it is that happened to him, and Joe's probably planning on it, they've got another thing coming. Nick will forcibly barricade his door if he has to. Joe needs food, a shower, and twelve deep hours of sleep.

"You drive a hard bargain. Mom, is the Vicodin in the cabinet?"

She murmurs an affirmative and goes to get it, and Nick is tired of being hit with new realizations of how much their lives suck right now because Joe always refuses medication. If he's accepting it without the smallest amount of bitching, he's a mess. Which. Obviously. But still.

"I'll make you the soup. Go take a hot shower."

"And here I thought I smelled like daises. Bring it upstairs?"

"Yeah."

" _Two_ bowls?"

"Yes, Joseph," Nick says, and it's only when he hears Joe start his quiet ascent up the stairs that he lets his shoulders slump and his eyes sting.

\--

TBC in part two!


End file.
